Of course it was the best. This is Alice Waters, for whom the provenance of everything she puts in her mouth is paramount.

The book, her first deeply personal account of her early life, begins in a lower-middle-class New Jersey neighborhood, with a mother who wore Adlai Stevenson buttons and inspired Ms. Waters’s daily vitamin habit, and a conservative, hard-working father who Ms. Waters discovered was perhaps not as uptight as she thought. Both helped Ms. Waters finance and organize Chez Panisse, the Berkeley restaurant that opened in 1971 and established the farm-to-table movement.

Ms. Waters wrote the book, which Clarkson Potter will publish on Sept. 5, reluctantly. It is the last in a three-book deal she signed more than a decade ago, and the least collaborative of the dozen books that bear her name. To produce it, she spent a year telling stories to Bob Carrau, a writer and longtime family friend. Cristina Mueller, a writer who once worked as her assistant, took dictation.

Sprinkled with photographs, the book traces Ms. Waters’s years as a European backpacker smitten with France and as a young radical cooking for the Bay Area’s antiwar intelligentsia. It ends the night the enthusiastic but very green cook opened her tiny, fixed-price French restaurant.

In the kitchen at Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Calif.; she never expanded her restaurant into other cities.

Jason Henry for The New York Times

Eager students of Ms. Waters’s place in America’s culinary history will most likely devour it as readily as her critics, who have called her the self-dramatizing Joan of Arc of American cuisine and compared her dictatorial style to that of the Khmer Rouge, will tear into it.

But for Ms. Waters, now 73 and still flitting through the kitchen at Chez Panisse to snag bites of prosciutto and ordering that the dining room shades be lifted to better capture the late afternoon California light, the book is something of a mike drop.

Although she has never been afraid of ridicule, Ms. Waters says she has entered a phase in which neither praise nor criticism mean all that much to her.

“I feel reassured about the content because it is what I experienced,” she said. “I couldn’t not be honest.”

Ms. Waters is not, by famous-chef standards, wealthy. Her most prized additions to the 1908 Craftsman bungalow she has lived in for 34 years are a waist-high hearth in the kitchen and bookshelves that hold remarkable collections on food, nature, art and film.

She drives an Audi (the cover to the center console is missing), often calling her assistant to determine the best route through the Bay Area’s brutal traffic. Her few concessions to fame include a prime parking spot on Saturdays at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market in San Francisco.

“I’ve never thought about making money,” she said. “That was never the goal.”

Still, Ms. Waters has not set foot in a conventional grocery store for 25 years. She remains devoted to the idea that all food should be organic, beautiful and eaten communally.

That approach, which once seemed strident and economically tone deaf, has seeped into everyday food culture. Ms. Waters’s image has softened into that of a grandmotherly sage whose wisdom young people especially seem eager to hear.

She recently was the host of an event on school lunches at a Slow Foods Nations gathering in Denver.

Ryan David Brown for The New York Times

“She is one of the titans of the mythical chefs in this country,” said the chef Diego Galicia, an owner of Mixtli, a progressive Mexican restaurant in San Antonio. “All roads lead to Alice Waters. You pull the thread, and it all unfolds.”

Ms. Waters is the reason restaurants started naming farms on menus and serving mesclun salads and American-made goat cheese.

“She is responsible for radicchio in the supermarket and the slice of blood orange on your airplane meal,” said the writer David Kamp, who chronicled the food revolution in which Ms. Waters was a leading character in his 2006 book, “The United States of Arugula.”

Yet she continues to play a kind of small ball that, over the years, has proved powerful. She has never expanded Chez Panisse to other cities, or jumped fully into celebrity in ways that could have promoted her agenda. Rather, she prefers to personally cajole every politician, journalist and philanthropist she meets.

In 1995, she wrote a letter to President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore that proposed an organic garden at the White House and a nationwide school curriculum based on sustainable agriculture. The White House staff created a small garden on the roof and started buying more organic and local food for the kitchen, a tradition the George W. Bush administration continued.

She then pushed President Obama to replace the White House chef, Cristeta Comerford, with a higher-profile chef who would better promote local and sustainably raised food. Mr. Obama kept Ms. Comerford on (as have the Trumps), but planted an organic garden that remains today.

Michelle Obama made improving school lunches and childhood nutrition a hallmark of her time in Washington, influenced in part by the Edible Schoolyard at Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School in Berkeley. The project has spawned at least 5,500 other school garden programs since Ms. Waters and the school’s principal conceived of it in 1995.

But even in Berkeley, Ms. Waters’s ideas haven’t been realized. Although her foundation paid for a chef to engineer a radical change in the district’s food program, Berkeley schools still don’t serve food that meets her standards.

Grilled zucchini and squash on a banquet table at Ms. Waters’s event at the Slow Food Nations gathering. She remains focused on giving all American children free organic food at school.

Ryan David Brown for The New York Times

“To scale something is always going to be a challenge,” said Traci Des Jardins, the San Francisco chef who opened Jardinière in 1998. “How do you keep the integrity? That’s what she always struggled with. You have to make sacrifices along the way to do that, and she has been so principled that she was not willing to make a concession.”

“I leveraged myself in the best of all possible ways,” she said. “I have given a philosophy of food which I learned from the French to everybody who works at the restaurant, and they take those values and make them their own.”

She remains singularly focused on what seems impossible in the current political climate: giving all American children free organic food at school and tying it into the curriculum. “Feeding children is a moral issue,” she said.

People, she added, should stop expecting the federal government to make it happen; public policy is too compromised by the interests of large food conglomerates. “Any way we do this has to be done outside of the government and outside the pyramid,” she said. “We need to go through the doors that are open, not the doors that are closed.”

To that end, she is pondering new ways to raise money through taxes, or from investors like Jeff Bezos. “We’re working on a letter to him,” she said.

She sees parallels between the state of politics today and the battles of 50 years ago, but her strategy is not to fight directly.

“Now is not the time,” she said over dinner in the upstairs cafe at Chez Panisse. “We’re like the French underground. We are passing notes to each other. But soon there will be something, an event, and we will come forward together. No one knows how powerful we are. We are vigilantes.”

Ms. Waters ordered a couple of salads, one built with arugula and prosciutto and another of purslane, cucumbers and Charentais melon. A dish of roasted Monterey Bay squid came to the table, along with a tangle of hand-cut, herbed noodles with chanterelles and thyme.

Her philosophy is posted at the Edible Schoolyard at Martin Luther King Middle School in Berkeley.

Jason Henry for The New York Times

Dessert was a collection of fruit starring a perfect Flavor King pluot, the kind of dish that critics say is more about shopping than cooking. But it was perfect, as it was in the more formal restaurant downstairs the night before. After 46 years, Chez Panisse is still a great place.

She asked a waiter to fill her glass with rosé and then not bring any more. More than a glass or two makes her too sleepy, she said. Not as in the old days, which she writes about in the book with lighthearted relish.

Ms. Waters describes drunken high school romps in the back seats of cars and subsequent pregnancy scares, a love of men and drink so powerful it got her kicked out of a college sorority on morals charges, and trips across Europe that did as much to provoke her culinary awakening as her sexual one.

She approaches other revelations with more sobriety. There was an attempted rape by a man who sneaked into her bedroom with a knife in the mid-1970s. She survived by jumping out a second-floor window, an incident that helped build a kind of steely resolve and confidence.

Ms. Waters writes with great affection about the men who were her big loves and shaped her views on film, music and politics, as well as the look and feel of the restaurant.

These days, Ms. Waters is more of an executive editor than a chef at Chez Panisse. She eats there every day when she is town, offering many, many suggestions.

“I hope everybody can see that I have a valuable role as a critic, because I’ve been there since the beginning and I’ve seen the restaurant go through lots of changes,” she writes.

Still, she knows people sometimes don’t ask for her opinion because she can be what might charitably be called insistent. To that end, Ms. Waters has worked on becoming more polite, saying please and thank you to the people under her umbrella.

Alice Waters in the Edible Schoolyard garden in Berkeley. “She is one of the titans of the mythical chefs in this country,” said the chef Diego Galicia.

Jason Henry for The New York Times

Ms. Waters lives alone now. She has never liked being alone, even as a child. Her last romantic relationship ended a couple of years ago. She is always looking for a new one because she is, above all else, a romantic. But she has some specific ideas about it.

“Younger men are my Achilles’ heel,” she said.

Her friends, like the former restaurant critic and Gourmet editor Ruth Reichl, worry that she won’t find someone who can go the distance with her.

“With Alice, you have to march to her tune,” Ms. Reichl said. “Anybody who is strong enough to take her on isn’t going to do what she wants to do.”

Ms. Waters is heartened that her only child, Fanny Singer, 34, is preparing to move back to the Bay Area from England. Ms. Singer, whose parents divorced more than 20 years ago, said she left “to form an identity outside of my mom’s magnetic orbit.” But the move was not a reflection on her deep affection for her mother.

“My mom is a hummingbird burrowing into flowers,” she said. “She’s so captivating you can’t help but be rapt.”

Ms. Waters’s plan has always been to spend her later years in a multigenerational commune of her own design. “I’d better get busy on that,” she said.